> Linux do the same thing. [..] Then there's Linux where each GUI update is a radical break with tradition that continually reinvents its own identity.
If you're using a "mainstream" desktop environment (e.g. GNOME), then yeah, but that's not universally true. I've been using exactly the same desktop environment for something like ~12 years; I love Linux because if you set it up right it's essentially zero maintenance (significantly less than Windows and macOS), and almost nothing changes without your consent. The only forced change during those 12 years that I've noticed was the migration to systemd, and Firefox reskinning their GUI for no good reason every other release.
The forced changes to the init system and desktop gui are far more radical than anything Microsoft or Apple ever did. The init system change was also due to the GUI people. GNOME told everyone they must adopt SystemD or else you can't use GNOME anymore. It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides. If a system administrator woke up from a 15 year coma, they would have no clue how to use any of this stuff and would have to start over from scratch. How can we as open source developers, present a better alternative to big tech products if we keep dividing and conquering ourselves? To think about how unfair that is to the thousands of volunteers who worked hard to create these desktops and systems and treasure troves of stack overflow answers, that just get swept away two years later, it's a failure of leadership.
Bah. If a sysadmin woke up from a coma, systemd would be the least of their worries, since it has a comprehensive manual, working backwards compatibility for most standard interfaces, and is in most cases much, much easier to deal with than what was before it.
They might scream in horror at how containers often get (ab)used though.
More like compound tragedy. The world's largest search engine used to run on a single computer. Now the world's smallest app has its own kubernetes cluster.
Come on, let’s stop this bullshit about systemd. It was goddamn voted on multiple times by debian maintainers, in a system that is markedly more democratic than anything we have in a country, and won with huge margins.
Also, previous incarnations were hard to maintain, had no logging before the mount of filesystems, had ill-defined service life cycle, etc. Booting is a hard problem. Having it all around the system in million shitty bash script is a ridiculous idea. Make it declarative as much as possible and have it handled by a single core program. And systemd does these perfectly, my only gripe with it is that it should not have been written in C, but such is everything in linux land.
It's obvious you feel strongly about this from your language, but there is no need to call someone else's opinion bullshit.
The reality is that systemd's wide adoption has made many people unhappy, for many reasons, some outlined in the Wikipedia article[1]. Systemd is overly complex, to the point of being obfuscated; systemd has many interlocked dependencies; systemd takes control away from the sysadmin and puts it into a fat binary; systemd goes against the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well"; systemd creates a pattern of homogenizing Linux architecture, and so on.
Lucky for us, unlike with Windows and Mac, there is no "One And Only GNU/Linux Distribution", and instead there are many options and alternatives, many of which have not integrated systemd at all, or only ported small parts of it.
Every day I am ever so grateful for the miracle and gift of FOSS. Thank you. Gracias. Spasibo. Dyakuyu. Merci. Danke.
Wow look at the names on that list. None of them had a choice though since the decision was made unilaterally. They woke up one day and were told to hand over control of their boot, userspace, ssh auth, and dns to this new program with binary logs that speaks nonstandard binary protocols. Open source essentially boils down to free candy from strangers on the Internet, and the thing that's historically made that work is transparency. Without it, you've got a system that requires faith and is fueled by the fumes of trust painstakingly built by those before you. That's why the old guard is unhappy about it.
I really don't understand the systemd hate. It's fine. It works. I never had any problems with it, neither on my desktop, nor on the servers I maintain. People I personally know also don't have any problems with it.
> It made people so unhappy there were forks, protests, and even suicides.
...a suicide over a different init system? Seriously?
Summary: It's overly complex, it has many interlocked dependencies, it takes control away from the sysadmin and puts it into a huge binary, it goes against the Unix philosophy of "do one thing well", it creates a pattern of homogenizing Linux architecture...
If you're using a "mainstream" desktop environment (e.g. GNOME), then yeah, but that's not universally true. I've been using exactly the same desktop environment for something like ~12 years; I love Linux because if you set it up right it's essentially zero maintenance (significantly less than Windows and macOS), and almost nothing changes without your consent. The only forced change during those 12 years that I've noticed was the migration to systemd, and Firefox reskinning their GUI for no good reason every other release.